Free geo data solutions compared: GeoNames.org vs. Yahoo! GeoPlanet

Yahoo! recently (eight months ago)
released big parts of their GeoPlanet
data. We successfully integrated the free dataset from
GeoNames.org into TheLabelFinder
platform and thought the GeoPlanet data is worth being reviewed and compared.
This artice is the result of our research.

Yahoo! recently (eight months ago)
released big parts of their GeoPlanet
data. We successfully integrated the free dataset from
GeoNames.org into TheLabelFinder
platform and thought the GeoPlanet data is worth being reviewed and compared.
This artice is the result of our research.

Both GeoNames and GeoPlanet provides Webservice Interfaces.
GeoNames offers a REST API while GeoPlanet uses SOAP.
But relying on third party webservices can sometimes
be tricky. The connection might be slow, unstable or even
totally broken because of any kind of server error.
This is why we prefer integrating the data into our own databases and applications.

Allow to associate multiple names in different languages and of different types with the same place

As you can see, their concepts overlap, but as always:
The devil is in the details.
The following table shows the most important differences.

GeoNames.org

Yahoo! GeoPlanet

Geo coordinates

yes

no

Structure

flat

hierarchical

Neighboring

no

yes

The biggest eye-catching disadvantage of the GeoPlanet data is:
It doesn't come with geo coordinates. That's really sad, because
the webservices they offer not only does support that but also
provides the bounding box of a given place which would be a really
handy feature.

But in contrast to GeoNames, GeoPlanet excels at structuring the data.
GeoNames' structure is flat. No record (GeoNames calls them toponyms) knows about its surrounding
location. E.g. Berlin does not know about Germany, which itself doesn't know about Europe and so forth.
GeoPlanet records, or places as they are called by Yahoo!, always (except one)
have a reference to its parent place and therefore offer relations between
places like the following:

Parent (direct surrounding place)

Child (direct sub-places)

Siblings (places sharing the same parent and place type)

Ancestors (set of all parents)

If you take e.g. our company's district you will get the following
family tree:

As meantioned before, we actively using the GeoNames data in
a production critical environment and are very happy with it.
The data quality suits our needs, but as long as we didn't
work with the GeoPlanet dataset it would be unfair trying
to judge them in this sector. If anybody already has some experiences,
or explicit examples: Please let us know.

GeoPlanet's hierarchical structuring looks promising and allows thinking about
some really neat features. Then again the lack of important
basic information like geo coordinates really upsets me. If Yahoo! considers integrating
center and bounding box information, the GeoPlanet data would be a real
competitor to GeoNames.

GeoNames on the other hand is a community driven project. The data might (who knows?)
be not as good as their GeoPlanet counterpart but you are free to register and change it yourself.
Many people (reasonably) fear a dependency on a big company like Yahoo! or Google.
In that case GeoNames might be the better choice.